(March 2, 2015) Light
behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein,
scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light
at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the
first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.
Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave
simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an
experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest
we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times.
Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists have now
been able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving both as a wave and
as a particle. The breakthrough work is published in Nature Communications.